DK: When my children were young, like most parents, I took great pleasure in reading bed-time stories. To start with there were the very simple picture books then we moved on to Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Watership Down was a favorite, I simplified the language as I read, the same with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I loved Alice in Wonderland, they didn’t. Young psychiatrist, former English major, reading devotee that I was, I would tune into these stories with my primary process paraphrase sensor and pick up on themes that helped me think in more depth and with more imagination about life as I was living it and experiencing it with my patients.
My idea is that while the bears are absent, Father and Mother and Baby Bear represent different kinds of men who hang out at The Three Bears Club. Consider the porridge, the chairs and the beds as representing qualities of these different men. The porridge is nurture, the rocking chairs, dancing and love making and the bed marriage and long term loving. Father Bear is the man who is too hot, too big and too hard, too manly, you could say. Mother Bear, a motherly man is lukewarm, too cool, too squeaky, too soft. He is characterized by insufficient passion, too much complaining, limited desire. But then there is Baby Bear. His porridge is just right, so she eats it all, then she finds his chair to be perfect, but what happens? Goldilocks breaks Baby Bear’s ‘chair(y)’. That is, she teaches him about sex, teaches him to be the erotic, loving, nurturing partner she desires.
So Goldilocks jumps from the window and runs away. But who jumps out of the window is her soul. Her body, named Goldilocks remains, while her soul named ‘I’ escapes goes away. Can she return?
Of course she can, but there is no guarantee she will. It is not a given that the soul fully resides in the body. As I suggested in earlier posts, marriage can augment health, that is, the relationship between two people, enriches the relationship between body and soul. The condition of soul not residing fully in the body is a way of thinking about what is hidden behind chronic illness both physical and emotional.